Why Standups Fail and What to Do Instead
The daily standup is the most cargo-culted ritual in modern software teams. Somewhere along the way we decided that standing in a circle, going around the...
9 min391Read →
Leadership — Page 5
From Code Reviews to Career Reviews: Growing the Engineers Around You
The single transition that most defined my growth as a leader was realizing that my job was no longer to write the best code in the room. It was to grow the...
5 min915Read →
The Quiet Cost of Hero Culture in Engineering Teams
Every engineering organization has a hero. The person who saves the launch at the last minute, who fixes the outage nobody else understands, who works the...
4 min389Read →
Hiring Senior Engineers in a Talent-Scarce Market: What Nigeria Taught Me
Hiring senior engineers is hard everywhere. Hiring them in a market like Nigeria's, where the most talented people are routinely recruited by companies paying...
5 min875Read →
Running 1-on-1s That Actually Change Outcomes
The one-on-one is the most powerful tool a manager has and the most commonly wasted. Done well, it is where problems surface while they are still small, where...
5 min632Read →
Technical Debt Is a Business Decision, Not an Engineering Failure
For most of my early career I talked about technical debt as if it were a moral failing, something sloppy teams accumulated and disciplined teams virtuously...
5 min741Read →
Why Your Best Engineers Leave, and How to Make Them Stay
Every time a strong engineer resigns, there is a temptation to reach for the simplest explanation: they got a better offer, it was about the money, nothing we...
4 min924Read →
Scaling an Engineering Team from 5 to 50 Without Losing the Plot
The hardest growth I have ever managed was not technical. It was watching a five-person team, where everyone knew everything and decisions happened over a...
5 min758Read →
The First 90 Days as a Fintech CTO: A Field Guide
Stepping into a CTO role at a fintech company is not like any other engineering job I have held, and I have held a few. The stakes are simply different. A bug...
6 min707Read →